Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

Start-of-season wax clinic at Soo Finnish Nordic tonight! Was really looking forward to this, 'cuz my skis haven't really had a proper waxing since I got them -- just whatever the store put on them, plus a daily touch-up with express wax.

So, my major learning for the evening: it turns out, applying proper wax to skis does indeed make them more slippery, and therefore faster! However, it also makes you more clumsy...! Going to have to check the package to see if this side effect is listed on there. Will be in touch with the wax manufacturer if not. ;)

Pro Tip™: if someone walks like a racist, talks like a racist, acts like a racist, they are, for all practical intents & purposes, a racist. You really do not need to know if they feel like a racist deep down in their heart of hearts to figure out what to do about them. This isn't rocket surgery, y'all. For a group of folks who coined the term "duck typing", we should be all over this.

To put it another geekly way: if someone does or says something racist, then follows it up with
"I was just trolling, yo! I'm not really racist!" then one right response is "I voluntarily fail my Will save! I am thoroughly convinced that you are a shitbag racist, and henceforth will treat you like one! :D"

I don't understand the rational basis behind people's opposition to Anita Sarkeesian's work, if indeed there is any.

I grant that I haven't plumbed the depths of Reddit, 4chan, and sundry gaming forums looking for reasoned argument, because those places are fucking gross. But what I have found seems to be naught more than a paranoid chorus of "she's out to get our games!"

Some self-identified "gamers" seem to think that Sarkeesian's saying "Stop making games". She's not. She's saying "Games can be better than this. Make better games."

The myriad cries of "censorship!" and "political correctness!" suggest the perceived danger is that games will change as a result of Sarkeesian's critique—that the amount of abuse and misogyny will decrease, and that the number of female characters with agency and development will increase. This makes the rallying cry of "she's out to get our games!" sound more like "she's out to emasculate our games!"

I have news for you, gamer dudes. If gratuitous misogyny and violence is how you define masculinity, then you've got a big fucking problem.

You would think that some things are just so racist that, on encountering them,
everyone—even white folks, almost to a one—would say
"holy FUCK that is some racist-ass shit, what the FUCK are you even thinking?"
A sort of Maximum Ignorable Racism Threshold, if you will.

If this supposed threshold did exist,
these racist-ass shirts
would never have seen the light of day.
Like, seriously, just think how many people have to have been party to that
production, with none of them raising sufficient hue and cry to put a stop to it.

I sorely doubt that this is much of a revelation to anyone who's not carrying around
a gigantor sack of white privilege. Chalk that up to yet another example of how
privilege works to hide the realities of the rest of the world from
people possessed of it.

By disclosing your postal code, you're essentially disclosing your home address. Especially from a personal safety perspective, if somebody knows your postal code and what you look like, they can almost certainly find you and your residence.

Now, given how personal this snippet of information is, you might not feel comfortable giving it away. If so, you can spread some holiday cheer and test their computing systems at the same time! Just tell them your postal code is:

Just think! As the poor statistics sorters sift through mounds of boring data, their faces will no doubt brighten as they see that Jolly Old St Nick's helpers were indeed busily working their way through the stores, stocking up on goodies for the holiday season. Just Imagine the glow on executives' faces when they see in the reports before them incontrovertible evidence that Santa's elves have been hard at work all year picking up toys, toasters, and tequila for good little children to find under the tree on Christmas Day. ^_^

A little while back, I was
asked on twitter:
if tech conferences
are, for women, an experience that's dangerous at worst and
uncomfortable at best, how do we go about fixing it?

This is rather a big question—basically akin to "how do we eliminate
sexism in society?" Conferences are a microcosm of the larger world;
they transmit most of its problems and amplify some to boot.
That being said, I'm certainly happy to outline what I think
some reasonable starting points for allies might be.

We got a sudden cold snap here in the Sault overnight, which reminds me of this story from back in the day.

For us, remembrance is a very abstract thing. Up there with ideals like heroism and valour.

Sacrifice is a very concrete thing. Like trying to get your goddamn frozen boots onto your feet yet again. Or being halfway around the world and years away from your loved ones, in a reality so far removed from your past life that it might as well be a different universe. Being sick every day. Or in pain, or worse.

It's a lot to think about as I sit here and watch the snow and wind blowing outside.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

A friend on twitter asked us to recommend interesting conferences,
so I looked through my notes to see what I had. One event that
I'd made a note to check out further was
KalamazooX.
The focus of the event is on
"soft skills",
so I was kind of surprised when I couldn't find a Code of Conduct
on the site. The "What people are saying" section, on the other
hand, made me raise an eyebrow:

"I've discovered @kalamazoox is a hidden gem. Today was like a braver, more profane set of dev-oriented TED talks. Lots of passion and humor."

"In a time where organizers are censoring speakers and their content, @mjeaton and @kalamazoox is a bastion of freedom. He is a luminary."

"@mjeaton @kalamazoox believes in the open exchange of ideas, however uncomfortable, and trusts humans to think, collaborate and create."

To be sure, though, I asked the organizers if they had a Code of Conduct via twitter,
and got
this reply:

@shadowspar We do not have a published code of conduct.
Our entire conference is about communication, respect and passion.

I parse this as

We don't feel as though we need a code of conduct, because
we have a "culture of respect".

...wow! Big learning experience during tonight's evening festivities. If someone wants to hit on me, here are two good ways to get our interaction off to the worst possible start:

be completely shitfaced drunk; and

offer me a drink by offering to give me an actual beverage that is already in your possession. (Your intentions may be completely aboveboard, but I have no idea where that drink's been or what might be in it.)

When denisementioned that putting up a news post causes the servers to send out hundreds of thousands of notifications, I thought to myself, "Wow, do we really have that many users? I should go and check the stats page!"

...aaand then as soon as I opened the page, I was all like OMG, THAT PAGE IS BEING GENERATED IN PART BY MY CODE NOW. :D :D :D

Before raking yourself over the coals and beating yourself up with a rousing chorus of, "Why the hell can't I get this thing working!?!", the preliminary question you need to ask is "Has this thing ever worked at all?"

I am honestly not at all a big fan of the big pharma companies. The fact that they spend much more money on marketing than R&D is loathesome, and some of their marketing practices are reprehensible at best.

That being said, I am long tired of the assertion, either implicit or explicit, that if I choose to treat a condition I might have with medication, that I am somehow "selling out", or better yet, that I am merely a guillible, brainwashed pawn of "Big Pharma".

Peel, cube, boil and drain potatoes.
Add cubed cheese, cheeze whiz, or what have you, while still hot, so as to melt the stuff.
Wait a bit to let the cheesy stuff melt, then mash it all together.
Add a bit of salt and a lot of black pepper. Stir well. Adjust to taste.

Dough:

~ 3 cups flour

1 egg

~ 1 cup water

Mix together, turn out, and knead.
Roll out fairly thin and cut into squares.
To pinch perogies, first roll up a ball of the filling then place it in the middle of a square. Fold over to form a triangle, then pinch the edges together to seal.

To cook: Boil about 5 min. They're ready when they all float to the top of the boiling water. If you like them crispy, you can then pan-fry them.

To freeze: place them on trays, with a bit of space between them, and stuff them in the freezer. Once they've frozen, you can take them off the trays and freezer bag them. (If you just bag & freeze them, they'll stick together.)

My parents & grandparents usually served these fried in butter or bacon grease, with fried onions and bacon on top, and a generous dollop of sour cream on the side. That being said, there are untold numbers of variations. This recipe's pretty easy to bend to your whims, and perogies are traditionally peasant food, besides. If you want to make perogies filled with shallots and paneer, or refried beans and salsa, or whatever, go for it! The Perogie Police will not show up with a warrant for your arrest. The Perogie Preservation Society will not picket your house. Seriously. =)

Probably one of the best things I've ever done for my health, mental, physical, or otherwise: establishing 10pm as The Time After Which No More Productive Things May Be Initiated.

Laundry piling up? Kitchen table overrun with junk? Recycling begging to be taken out? Too bad. Protecting my sleep is too important, and after having run all day since tumbling out of bed at 6:30am, I don't think one hour to myself is too much to ask for.

FWIW: not only is this stuff super-crumbly and hella messy, it also makes hardwood floors slippery as all hell. As proof of which, witness the complete feet-out-from-underneath wipeout my 4yo daughter had tonight.

If your kids get some of this headache-disguised-as-modelling-compound for giftmas, do yourselves a favour and throw it right in the trash.

War is a catastrophic event and there are no more ardent peacemakers than those of us who have experienced it. :Ian Townsend, Secretary-General, British Legion

Going to be on the road for Remembrance Day today. What'll be going through my mind? That, ironically enough, the pacifist folks who are often derided as being unpatriotic and anti-military oft seem to be the only ones doing one of the most benevolent things you can do for the troops -- namely, asking the questions, "Do we need to go to war?" "Is battle the appropriate solution for this problem?" "What do we hope to achieve by 'sending in the troops'?"

We honour our soldiers and our fallen heroes by refusing to allow their service and sacrifice to have been made in vain.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morningWe will remember them.

Wow, it's been the better part of a year since I posted one of these. Ooops. <_<;

I've had a whole bunch of stuff going on in my personal life that's made it difficult to get in much practice. Despite this, my shifting is coming along shockingly well, at least relative to how much time I've managed to put into it. Starting to work on Bach's Minuets #s 1 and 2 from the first Suzuki book. They actually sound pretty good once I get everything together.

It's frustrating to feel like I could be progressing a lot faster if I actually managed to get organized enough to put more time in. Hopefully things will improve in the coming months, and I'll manage to do just that, so I can take off like a rocket. ^_^;

Maybe it's because I'm getting old and cranky; maybe it's the surfacing of impulsivity that I didn't feel I had, but -- as of late, I'm finding I have very, very little patience for screencasts, presentations, podcasts, and the like, unless they are very, very on-point vis-a-vis something I'm interested in at the moment.

I can read something like 450 words per minute. I'm not going to sit through 100-150wpm speech for very long to figure out if I'm interested in what's being said, especially if I can find the topic explained better elsewhere in text.

People in the tech world seem increasingly wont to use multimedia as the primary or even sole form of documentation for everything from software libraries to consumer websites, a practice of which I am not enamoured. skud wrote up an excellent blurb about such things over in the growstuff wiki.

I've worked with computers and software almost all of my life.
The tech industry has created a lot of amazing things, and we
continue to crank out more of them every day.
(I mean, we pretty much bumble through the actual development
and testing process, but in the end we kind of get things
to mostly work. Usually.)

One place where I truly think we are falling down, though,
is bridging the gap between the technologies we create
and humanity as a whole. We build social networking tools
without considering what kind of behaviours and societal
norms they'll encourage. From a place of relative privilege,
we may be oblivious to how our creations can be turned to
disturbing ends. The choices we make determine whether
new technologies will work for the benefit of all, or
deepen the many inequalities that exist in our world.

One day, I hope to engage in my own research, looking
how people change when they're using or building
software: how the norms set by technologies and technical communities
influence people's behaviour; why people seem to so readily commit
acts or omissions online that they might consider unethical offline.

I don't think I would know that this kind of research career was
even possible if it wasn't for danah boyd.

If you've read much anything about online youth, especially
when it comes to topics like bullying, social media, and privacy,
you've almost certainly encountered her work.
Her extensivewritings
span a dizzying number of facets of online interaction, identity, and
culture. Especially on the topic of youth, Her research has often
shown that the "conventional wisdom" surrounding how people use the
internet is baseless and mistaken, with obvious ramifications for
technologists and policymakers alike.

I really don't get the impression that
academia in its current incarnation makes it very easy to
engage in this kind of
cross-disciplinary research
-- inquiry that's not only valuable, but profoundly important if we are
to build out the future in a way that makes things better
for all of humanity.
danah has shown not only that this work is meaningful and
that it's worthwhile, but also that it's possible to make a
brilliantly successful go of it, and that's something for which I'm
very grateful.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging about women in science, technology, engineering and maths.
You can find more information at the Finding Ada website.

The Disney busses at WDW show their destinations in the front window like most any other, so you see busses marked MAGIC KINGDOM, EPCOT, POP CENTURY, etc etc. Some other ones aren't marked with destinations per se, but their purpose is pretty obvious -- things like VIP CAST MEMBER, TRAINING, etc.

The thing that's been piquing my curiosity to no end ever since getting here: some of the busses are marked JASMINE. Huh, what? It's not like Jasmine is riding around in them. I figured it was some kind of semi-secret tour bus, maybe Keys or Backstage Magic or something, but that doesn't make sense when you see JASMINE busses tooling around at 11pm.

Finally broke down and asked a cast member last night. JASMINE means that the bus is going out of service for any reason. Kind of figures, what with Disney wanting to keep up the illusion that everything is always magically perfect and nothing ever breaks or goes offline. =)

"NHL season could be abandoned due to labour dispute." I feel like this isn't even news any more.

My feelings are the same as always: don't feel bad for the owners, all of whom are independently wealthy, to say the least; don't feel bad for the players, the NHL salary minimum is something like $500,000. Even the fans can suck it up. The people who're really losing out in this are folks whose livelihoods depend on the league in other ways: journalists who cover it; folks who run the concession stands at the games, and everyone in between.

Something that dawned on me while I was writing this piece on
bug chaining
-- ever run into software where your experience was
being controlled by bugs, and not the software's features?
Sometimes things get so bad that you feel like you're being
kicked from one defect to another instead of piloting your
own way through the software.

To me, that feels almost exactly like the difference
between the
slings
and the
flippers
being in control of your pinball. ^_^;

I got a pair of
Merrel Waterpro Maipos
way back in the day. While they were the most amazing shoes
in the history of ever in terms of fit and foot comfort,
they were the the worst ever in terms of durability; they started coming
apart after I'd only worn them a couple of times.
I kinda wonder if they were only intended for light/occasional use, like
being worn while canoeing or some such?
Anyway, ideally I think I'd like something similar except built to last.
The breathe-y mesh sides were awesome for keeping my feet happy --
usually a full day wearing something like dress shoes is enough to
make the footwear-interior-environment pretty swampy, and travel days
where you're on your feet and in your shoes for like 18 hours at a go
are even worse.

The runners I've been wearing since haven't really been cutting it for
me in terms of fit, function, or fashion, and the latest pair is
almost dead. So...time to muckle onto some new shoes. As per
usual, the stores around here have little to nothing I'm interested in,
and since I'm not making any shopping trips in the very near future,
it's off to the internets we go. Here are a couple of candidates...

...when you finally figure out the name, and from thence the lyrics, of a tune you've been hearing since forever. Oftimes, the song turns out to be almost exactly unlike the mental image of it you'd formed in your head. Sometimes the two are so incongruous as to be completely absurd.

To wit: Funiculì, Funiculà. Here's Andrea Bocelli singing it. Assuming you don't speak Neapolitan, listen to the performance first, then head over to the Wikipedia page and see what this uplifting, noble tune is an ode to. =)